Path 2

Path 2

Film

November 2, 2004

French actor Laurent Lucas has a genuinely creepy presence (hissing voice, menacing underbite), but ironically, he’s best known stateside as the straight man to his co-stars’ pathological nutcases. In In My Skin, Lucas plays the patient boyfriend of a woman who becomes obsessed with auto-mutilation. In With a Friend Like Harry, he’s a family man defending home and hearth against Sergi López’s homicidal stalker. Lucas finally gets to wig out in Gilles Marchand’s hospital-set Who Killed Bambi?, in which he plays a physician who pilfers anesthetics to have his way with patients. Nursing trainee Isabelle (Sophie Quinton) suspects something is askew, but the good doctor (who nicknames her Bambi) seduces her into a dreamlike web of . . . well, something. Too vague in its cat-and-mouse play to succeed as a psychological thriller, Who Killed Bambi? fares better as a visual exercise in white-on-whiteness—lab jackets, fluorescent glares, and Isabelle’s own pale skin combine for a sustained atmosphere of bleached-out horror.